Socioeconomic Status and Health: Why is the Relationship Stronger for Older Children?

Janet Currie and Mark Stabile

No 9098, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Case, Lubotsky, and Paxson (2001) show that the well-known relationship between socio- economic status (SES) and health exists in childhood and grows more pronounced with age. However, in cross-sectional data it is difficult to distinguish between two possible explanations. The first is that low-SES children are less able to respond to a given health shock. The second is that low SES children experience more shocks. We show, using panel data on Canadian children that: 1) the gradient we estimate in the cross section is very similar to that estimated previously using U.S. children; 2) both high and low-SES children recover from past health shocks to about the same degree; and 3) that the relationship between SES and health grows stronger over time mainly because low-SES children receive more negative health shocks. In addition, we examine the effect of health shocks on math and reading scores. We find that health shocks affect test scores and future health in very similar ways. Our results suggest that public policy aimed at reducing SES-related health differentials in children should focus on reducing the incidence of health shocks as well as on reducing disparities in access to palliative care.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ltv
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Published as Currie, Janet and Mark Stabile. "Socioeconomic Status And Child Health: Why Is The Relationship Stronger For Older Children?," American Economic Review, 2003, v93(5,Dec), 1813-1823.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9098.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9098

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9098

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().